(ANALYSIS) An estimated 18 million Americans are invested in cryptocurrency, according to the Federal Reserve. And the United States just elected a pro-crypto president. But is cryptocurrency a good ethical investment?
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(ANALYSIS) The creative economy is about translating the inspiration of culture and ideas into high-value businesses and enterprises. For billions of people around the world their faith is a big source of inspiration and creativity. Artificial intelligence will be a major disruptor of our economy. It will also allow many people to join the ranks of the creative economy like never before. In essence, faith has a role to play in the unfurling of the next chapter in humanity’s economic story.
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(OPINION) Our grandson Connor made a very interesting comment when he was a little boy. His parents (our daughter and son-in-law) were praying for him when he was fighting some minor illness, asking God to heal him. When nothing happened, he said, “Jesus doesn’t have enough hands to heal everyone.”
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(ANALYSIS) As the star of the scathing documentary "Religulous" — "religious" plus "ridiculous" — Bill Maher has never hidden his agnostic views about faith. But that doesn't mean the stand-up comic doubts the reality of evil. Consider his blistering comment on smartphones, drawn from his “Real Time” talk show earlier this year.
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(ANALYSIS) I have been keeping an Artificial Intelligence folder for several weeks now, with a focus — naturally — on topics that should interest religious leaders.
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(ANALYSIS) Maybe churches should consider a strategic change in their worship plans, said the Rev. Russell Moore in a podcast conversation with Jonathan Haidt, author of the bestseller “The Anxious Generation” and the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University. Check out Part 1 of 2 of Terry Mattingly’s latest “On Religion” column.
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Christian men and women use pornography more today than in 2016 when Barna spotlighted the sin among pastors and congregants, an updated study found in calling the church to be a place of healing for those impacted by the pervasive and destructive phenomenon.
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(ANALYSIS) If you’ve spent time on Facebook, you may have noticed photorealistic images that are too good to be true: children holding paintings that look like the work of professional artists, or majestic log cabin interiors that are the stuff of Airbnb dreams. Others, such as renderings of Jesus made out of crustaceans, are just bizarre.
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The website, AtoneNet, posted the responses — no names attached — for public perusal, and before Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, published a pamphlet compiling them. Printed out and tucked inside a holiday prayer book, the community’s confessions gave the liturgy — and the act of repentance — a 21st-century refresh and personalized feel.
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(ANALYSIS) The Shroud of Turin, the world’s most famous and most-examined artifact, is revered by devotees as the actual burial cloth that covered Jesus Christ’s body after his crucifixion. Many will consider that inconceivable, but is there reason to accept the claim? Or is this celebrated cloth merely a pious artwork, or a clever fraud, that originated in medieval times?
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Over the last five years, a growing number of single Muslim women in their mid-30s in Islamic countries — including the UAE, Qatar and Egypt, among others — have been choosing to freeze their eggs to ensure motherhood later in life. It was previously not seen as an option in these countries — owing primarily to cultural beliefs and religious restrictions.
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(ANALYSIS) In my “On Religion” column — “Jonathan Haidt: It's time for clergy to start worrying about smartphone culture” — I focused on what the author of “The Anxious Generation” had to say about the decisions faced by religious believers in the age of digital-screens culture.
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(ANALYSIS) Preaching to teenagers has always been a challenge. In the smartphone age, clergy need to realize that the odds of making a spiritual connection have changed — radically. Young people who spend as many as 10 or more hours a day focusing on digital screens will find it all but impossible to listen to an adult talk about anything, especially in a religious sanctuary.
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(REVIEW) Cryptocurrency is a really fascinating topic worth talking about. It’s gratifying to see it being talked about in the context of faith. If the documentary had only trusted the audience more to inform them rather than advertise to them, it would have added something even more valuable to the conversation.
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(ANALYSIS) Christianity, with its rich history of metaphysical claims and moral imperative, offers a bulwark against a descent into chaos — not for everyone, I know, but for a chunk of humanity. It provides a narrative that encompasses human suffering, offers redemption and asserts the inherent dignity of the individual, grounded in the image of God. Peter Thiel is aiming to bring that to the tech world.
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BibleDojo, an interactive online platform, merges faith and technology in an effort to increase biblical literacy and fluency among Christians. Launched this past January, the program features click-through, dojo-themed lessons that aim to strengthen Christians’ reading skills for different genres of the Bible.
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Artificial intelligence could organize worship music sets, plan church budgets and perform administrative tasks as well as or better than humans, half or more of Christians said in new research from Barna Group and Gloo.
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Religious leaders from across the world meet in Hiroshima, Japan, to sign the “Rome Call for AI Ethics” — emphasizing the vital importance of guiding the development of artificial intelligence with ethical principles that promote peace.
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(ANALYSIS) The more we rely on AI, the more we find ourselves yearning for something it cannot provide: authenticity, meaning and opportunities to connect on a fundamentally human level. This is where the church reenters the scene, not as a relic of the past, but as a symbol of the present, a sanctuary of authenticity. At this tipping point of artificiality and superficiality, people start craving transcendent values that algorithms cannot encode.
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What if, when you Googled a question about Holocaust history, instead of being taken to, say, Wikipedia or a news article, you were just given a few bullet points written by artificial intelligence? This is the sort of thing a new UNESCO report, “AI and the Holocaust: Rewriting History?” warns about.
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